Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accused Rachel Reeves of opening “a back door to free movement” over a potential migration deal with the EU. The Chancellor believes that Britain needs to sign an “ambitious” migration deal with the bloc that would allow young people from Europe to live and work in Britain.
The move forms part of her plan to boost the economy and lessen the need for tax rises in the forthcoming budget. Reeves is under pressure to fill a £30 billion black hole in the nation’s finances and has called on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to include the benefits of the government’s Brexit reset in its upcoming forecast. The Chancellor hailed a youth mobility scheme which would allow young people from across Europe to live and work in the UK and vice versa, as something that would be “good for the economy, good for growth and good for business”.
She told the Times: “We want the OBR to score it. They scored it when we left the European Union. They should score both the improved trade relationships that we’ve negotiated and this youth experience scheme.”
The move to urge the OBR to include income from post-Brexit agreements would mean that the official forecaster would make more favourable assessments of the UK’s economic health ahead of the November 26 budget.
The OBR has previously suggested that Britain’s current GDP is around 4% lower than it would have been had it remained in the EU.
Research suggests that if net migration were to rise by 31,000 a year due to the mobility scheme, it would generate a GDP increase of 0.45% in ten years, equivalent to £5 billion a year.
Reeves added: “We have agreed as a government that we want to have an ambitious youth experience scheme to allow young people in Britain to be able to go and work, to travel, to volunteer, to gain experience, to learn languages in European countries.
“And we want young people from those European countries to also be able to come to the UK and have the same opportunities that my generation had to travel and work and study in Europe.
“We also want the OBR to score that because when we left the European Union, the OBR said that our economy would be 4% smaller as a result. As a result of that reset in May, we think the economy will be stronger.”
However, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has warned that such a scheme would “effectively be a back door to free movement”.
The Chancellor has so far failed to communicate how many people would be expected to arrive in the country if the scheme were introduced, but some estimates put the number as high as 50,000.
